Volunteer Activation Day

On Saturday the 17th of September we invited our volunteer community to join some of the TEDxAdelaide 2016 crew in a content creation activity. Despite the looming threat of inclement weather, we were really pleased with the number of volunteers who showed up, completely in the dark about what exactly they would be doing.

After some introductions from the TEDxAdelaide team we gave the fantastic content creators their task: they would be split into random groups of three, given a list of prompts such as ‘metamorphosis’, ‘TEDxcellent’ and ‘Adelaide is awesome’, take pictures that represented these prompts and then upload them to social media. They had one hour to cross off as many prompts as possible. The groups had a few minutes to come up with a team name, form a strategy and decide which social media service they would use to post their pictures and how they would let us know it was them.

As the teams left, the TEDxAdelaide crew gathered together to wait as the results of our little exercise began pouring in. We were absolutely amazed and thrilled to see that, with no collaboration between teams, our content creators covered the three major social networks. We had one team posting on Facebook, using a hashtag to mark their photos. Another team hit the twitter stream similarly using a hashtag and tweeting @TEDxAdelaide. Our other two teams both used Instagram, the popular photo sharing platform, but in different ways; one team created a brand new Instagram account that we could follow, the other team used the hashtag #tedxadelaide to help us find their content. It was completely electric watching the pictures flow in, seeing how the different teams functioned and how they interpreted the prompts. Check out some of the pictures from our talented volunteer community teams below!

Team ‘AnaLisaK’
Team #TeamSixiePixie
Team ‘CIA_Adelaide’
Team ‘ZHT’

When all of our teams had returned we had a debrief and an information session, telling these volunteers what we have coming up as we prepare for the TEDxAdelaide 2016 conference on Thursday the 20th of October and letting them know what we were looking for. We also took the opportunity to get a few fantastic photos of the whole group.